INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
A group of Indian troopers who fought for the English, Ghulam Ali Khan, 1815-16The English East India Company, founded in 1600, was
But as the powerful multinational corporation expanded its control over India in the late 18th Century, it commissioned many remarkable
artworks from Indian painters who had previously worked for the Mughals
Writer and historian William Dalrymple writes about these hybrid paintings which explore life and nature.
Calcutta in the late 1770s was
Asia's biggest boom town: known as the City of Palaces, the East India Company's bridgehead in Bengal had doubled in size to 400,000
inhabitants in a decade.
It was now unquestionably the richest and largest colonial city in the East - though certainly not the most
orderly.
"It would have been so easy to turn it into one of the most beautiful cities in the world," wrote the Count de Modave, a friend of
Voltaire who passed through at this time
"One cannot fathom why the English allowed everyone the freedom to build in the most bizarre taste, with the most outlandish planning."
Nor
were visitors much taken by its English inhabitants
Most had come East with just one idea: to amass a fortune in the quickest possible time.
Image captionAn Indian trooper who fought for the
English, Ghulam Ali Khan, 1819Calcutta (now Kolkata) was a city where great wealth could be accumulated in a matter of months, then lost in
minutes in a wager or at the whist table
Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and the constant presence of mortality made men hard and callous.
Rising with Olympian
detachment above the mercantile bawdiness of his contemporaries was the rotund figure of the chief justice of the new Supreme Court, Sir
Elijah Impey.
A portrait of him by Johan Zoffany still hangs, a little lopsidedly, in the Kolkata High Court
It shows him pale and plump, ermine gowned and dustily bewigged.
Impey was, however, a serious scholar and unusual in taking a serious
interest in the land to which he had been posted.
Image copyrightPEMILLE KLEMPImage captionIndian villagers by Ghulam Ali Khan, 1815-16On
the journey out to India, a munshi (administrator) had accompanied him to teach him Bengali and Urdu, and on arrival the new chief justice
began to learn Persian and collect Indian paintings
His house became a meeting place where the more cultured elements of Calcutta society could discuss history and literature.
Impey and his
wife Mary were also greatly interested in natural history and began to collect a menagerie of rare Indian animals.
At some stage in the
mid-1770s, the Impeys decided to bring a group of leading Mughal artists - Sheikh Zain ud-Din, Bhawani Das and Ram Das - to paint their
private zoo.
It was probably not the first commission of Indian artists by British patrons
"The Study of Botany is of late Years become a very general Amusement," noted one enthusiast, and we know that the Scottish nurseryman James
Kerr was sending Indian-painted botanical drawings back to Edinburgh as early as 1773.
But the Impeys' albums of natural history painting
remain among the most dazzlingly successful of all such commissions: today, a single page usually reaches prices of more than £330,000
($387,000) at auctions, and the 197 images from the Impey Album are now widely recognised as among the very greatest glories of Indian
painting.
Image copyrightFRANCIS WAREImage captionEnglish child seated on a pony and surrounded by three Indian servants by Shaikh Muhammad
AmirThis month, for the first time since the Impey Album was split up in the 18th Century, around 30 of its pages will be reassembled for a
major exhibition in the Wallace Collection in London.
Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company celebrates some of the
extraordinary work which resulted from commissions made by East India Company patrons from master Indian artists between the 1770s and
1840s.
It will be a unique chance to see some of the finest Indian paintings which are now scattered in private collections around the
world.
The three artists who Impey summoned to his fine classical house in Middleton Street were all from Patna, 200 miles (320km) up the
Ganges.
The most prolific was a Muslim, Shaikh Zain-al-Din, while his two colleagues, Bhawani Das and Ram Das, were both Hindus.
Image
captionA finely painted miniature depicting four British officers with their wives taking refreshments at a table, artist unknownTrained in
the late Mughal style and patronised by the Nawabs of Murshidabad and Patna, they quickly learned to use English watercolours on English
Watman watercolour paper, and take English botanical still lives as their models
In this way an extraordinary fusion of English and Mughal artistic impulses took place.
Zain ud-Din's best works reveal a superb
synthesis between a coldly scientific European natural history specimen illustration, warmed with a profoundly Indian sensibility and vital
feeling for nature.
At his best - whether by instinct or inherited knowledge and training - he channels the outstanding Mughal achievement
in natural history painting of 150 years earlier, when the great Mughal artist Mansur painted animals and birds for the Emperor
Jahangir.
Image captionPortrait of a Mughal artist, by Yellapah Of Vellore, 1832-1835Nowhere are the merits of Company Painting better
illustrated than in Zain ud-Din's astonishing portrait of a Black Headed Oriole (No
27).
At first glance, it could pass for a remarkably skilful English natural history painting
Only gradually does its hybrid origins become manifest.
The brilliance and simplicity of the colours, the meticulous attention to detail,
the gem-like highlights, the way the picture seems to glow, all these point unmistakably towards Zain ud-Din's Mughal training.
Image
captionPortrait of a black headed oriole by Zain ud-DinAn idiosyncratic approach to perspective also hints at this background: the tree
trunk is rounded, yet the grasshopper which sits on it is as flat as a pressed flower, with only a hint of outline shading to give it depth
- the same technique used by Mansur.
Yet no artist working in a normal Mughal atelier would have placed his bird detached from a landscape
against a white background, with the jackfruit tree on which its sits cut into a perfect, scientific cross-section.
Equally no English
artist would have thought of painting the bark of that cross section the same brilliant yellow as the oriole; the tentative washes of a
memsahib's watercolour are a world away.
The two traditions have met head on, and from that blinding impact an inspirational new fusion
has taken place.
Bhawani Das, who seems to have started off as an assistant to Zain ud-Din, is almost as fine an artist as Zain
ud-Din.
Image captionIndian trooper holding a spear by Ghulam Ali Khan, 1815-186He is acutely sensitive to shape, texture and expression,
as for example in his celebrated study of a great fruit bat with the contrast between its soft, furry body with the angular precision of its
blackly outstretched wings, as if it were some caped Commendatore ushering a woman into a Venetian opera rather than a creature in a
colonial menagerie.
Now, for the first time, the work of these great Indian artists painting in this brilliantly hybrid Anglo-Indian style
are beginning to get the attention they deserve.
The first-ever museum show of this work in the UK aims to highlight and showcase the work
of a series of extraordinary Indian artists, each with their own style and tastes and agency
Indeed the greatest among them - such as Zain ud-Din- deserve to be remembered as among the most remarkable Indian artists of all time.
